Saturday, June 28, 2008

Do You Ever Act in Real Life?

When I was younger I liked to add humor to my life with dramatisation. Some people appreciated it, but some just didn’t get it and thought I was odd. If I had hung out with actors I would have fit right in. After encountering enough people with no sense of humor, I learned to be cautious.

But this morning it happened without warning.

I have a problem with library books. My library lets me renew them once online, but only once. If it’s a novel, I’m done with it in a few days. A biography usually takes me a lot longer to read. Currently I’m reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, and it’s taking me quite a while. I renewed it once, but I still have about 50 pages to go and as of this morning, the book was about 2 weeks overdue. So, I tend to accumulate library fines regularly. It bothers me. This morning after going to the bank I figured I couldn’t avoid the situation any longer, especially since there was an inter-library loan book waiting for me (the German translation of the same book: Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen). So I went to the library, went to the desk and started to explain my dilemma to the new librarian. I started stammering, and suddenly I put my face in my hands and blurted out “Will this confession be confidential?” The librarian assured me it would. After I finished telling her my story, she wordlessly turned to her computer and started clicking away. When she finished she said, “I’m renewing this for you, but only because I think you’re going to win an Academy Award someday.”

I’m pretty sure I abandoned caution because the librarian looked like she could have been Pat Fraley’s sister, with her Puck-ish grin and laugh lines that suggested a lifetime of humor. When I told this story to my sister, she laughed out loud and then told me a story of her own:

She was at Zabar’s Delicatessen waiting to get strudel, back in the days when the strudel counter was at the back of the store, off the beaten path. An elderly gentleman was in line behind her, and there was nobody at the counter to wait on them. They were commiserating about the long wait, and finally my sister said to him, “Maybe they’ll come if we get into a fight.” And she yelled “I was here first!” The gentleman obligingly yelled back “No, I was here first!!!” A Zabar’s employee rushed over to the strudel counter, my sister and her co-conspirator winked at each other, and before long they both had their strudel.

Life is a lot more fun when you take risks – even little ones.

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